1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the management of presentation material of an enterprise in general, and more particularly, automatic generation of presentation material. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for automatic generation of presentation material by analyzing agenda and making use of an enterprise presentation database consisting of annotated analogical examples, templates, and slid gratuitement es.
2. Description of Related Art
Enterprises marketing their products and services meet regularly their clientele and prospects for business promotion purposes. Many times, there are several meetings with a client with different groups and to make the presentations more effective, the presentation material needs to be tuned keeping in mind the group profile. Lack of adequate time to manually prepare a presentation may force the presenter to make best use of his/her experience in delivering the presentation using a slightly out-of-date presentation material. This kind of mismatch between displayed content and articulated content could make the whole presentation somewhat ineffective. An alternative is to deploy a skilled team of professionals to help prepare the right presentation given the group profile. However, even in this case, there may be situations when this team of professionals is busy leading to the use of “what I have” presentation material. This establishes a need for an automatic generation presentation material based on group profile.
A matured or growing enterprise has a collection of presentations made over a period of time with varying successes. An automated system that could use this vast presentation base could help either individual presenters or a skilled team of presentation designers to quickly assemble an adequate number of slides in order that meets the client's expectations. On account of the nature and complexity involved with the automatic generation, it is worthwhile to explore a system that could manage a vast presentation base and generate a fairly acceptable draft version of the presentation material. This draft version can be fine tuned by a presenter, again taking as much assistance from the system as possible. A better organization of the presentation base can help (a) achieve using as much of the available information in as much effective manner as possible; and (b) provide fairly intuitive means of user interactions for fine tuning the presentations. The system can use the experience base of the enterprise in a systematic way by creating several templates that can be used under various circumstances. Templates are a well known way abstracting information for a wider applicability and some of the examples of templates include document template and drawing template. A template contains adequate information about (a) how to evaluate the suitability of a template for a given situation; (b) how to instantiate the various fields of a template with specific data; and (c) how to construct the desired object (such as document or drawing) using template as the basis. Using example presentations is yet another way of providing additional information to the system to help generate presentations for a given situation. Specifically, an example related to a similar situation is retrieved from the presentation base and used as the basis for presentation generation.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,148,330 to Puri; Deepak (San Francisco, Calif.); Yurica; Kevin (San Francisco, Calif.); Marshall; John (Saratoga, Conn.) for “System and method for automatically generating content for a network channel” (issued on Nov. 14, 2000 and assigned to Netscape Communications Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.)) describes a system and method for automatically generating content for distribution via a network channel.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,516,340 to Boys; Mark A. (Aromas, Calif.) for “Method and apparatus for creating and executing internet based lectures using public domain web page” (issued on Feb. 4, 2003 and assigned to Central Coast Patent Agency, Inc. (Aromas, Calif.)) describes a system for creating and conducting interactive lectures via the Internet or other wide-area networks.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,580,438 to Ichimura; Satoshi (Palo Alto, Calif.); Nelson; Lester D. (Santa Clara, Calif.); Pedersen; Elin R. (Redwood City, Calif.) for “Systems and methods for maintaining uniformity in a presentation environment” (issued on Jun. 17, 2003 and assigned to Fuji Xerox Co., Ltd. (Tokyo, JP)) describes a presentation control systems and methods that provide support for manipulating the context of elements within a presentation. Specifically, the systems and methods of this invention receive a request to display a presentation element, for example, a slide. The context of the slide is then manipulated in accordance with a style profile, or template, that can ensure a uniform display characteristic between presentation elements of varying formats.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,684,369 to Bernardo; Richard S. (Needham, Mass.); MacPhee; David A. (San Mateo, Calif.) for “Web site creator using templates” (issued on Jan. 27, 2004 and assigned to International Business Machines, Corporation (Armonk, N.Y.)) describes a software tool for use with a computer system for simplifying the creation of Web sites. The tool comprises a plurality of pre-stored templates, comprising HTML formatting code, text, fields, and formulas that are used during the creation of a web site.
A set of guidelines for authoring effective presentations is mentioned in “Tips for Building Computer-Based Presentations,” by Chial Michael R., PhD, University of Wisconsin—Madison. A brief about this prior art is provide in the following. Agenda helps in identifying the subject and manner of approach (Page 2, Section 2). Goal defines the expected impact on the audience members based on the presentation (Page 2, Section 2). The production of a presentation must be based on the right template that fits the defined goal (of presentation), form and format of content, the mode of presentation (such as on-screen or web-browser based), color schemes that avoid contrast and visibility issues, the general principle of simplicity and consistency (Page 4, Section 2.A)
Having put in text and non-text material into slides, it is appropriate to emphasize textual material for visual effects and non-textual material for effects such as color and motion (Page 4-5, Section D). The used template can be edited for template attributes (such as size, placement, or color) for frame-level object attributes, and for misspellings (Page 5, Section E). Also, use alternative presentations (such as cartoons, photographs, or flow charts) for effect (Page 3, Section E). The document helps in planning, producing, and delivering of presentations to audiences using computer-based tools such as PowerPoint. These tools offer excellent features to support organizing, editing, and presenting a variety of media (such as text, audio, or video) (Page 1, Second Paragraph).
The above prior art that provides tips describes how the tools such as PowerPoint can be made use of (a) to incorporate “frames” each of which may contain a mix of text, charts, or other images; (b) to incorporate sound, animations, or movie clips; and (c) to deliver the presentations in various ways such as printed material and self-playing kiosk programs. The tips are meant for human beings who have knowledge and information, and help them relate their knowledge and information to deliver presentations to audiences using computer-based tools. The tips assist in orienting a presentation to purpose, goal, agenda, and audience, and suggest sequencing and prioritizing of ideas and evidence in a way that works well. Having organized and sequenced the content, the tips describe how to present the same keeping in mind multimedia content and visual appeal. In particular, templates help select alternative ways of creating layout for content and content positioning, color schemes, animations, and text formats.
Typically, in a large organization, the knowledge is vastly distributed across the organization. Many a times, presentations are created and delivered by sales force that might not have all the content that is required for presentations within themselves. Further, the time available for planning, content gathering, and content sequencing is very minimal. There are research teams within the organization that generate content for their own presentations and naturally, the organization stands to gain if such collective content could be made use of in every presentation. While the tips suggested in the above mentioned prior art is very useful for individuals who possess knowledge, it is impractical to expect the full utility of such tips in larger organizations. Definitely, these tips are necessary but are not sufficient. The proposed invention is in a direction to fill up this gap and clearly outlines a practical and useful means for addressing the issues related to distributed knowledge and minimal time-to-prepare.
The known systems do not address the issue of automatic generation of presentation material from agenda. The present invention provides with an automatic interactive system to users to input agenda to help generate draft version of a presentation. Also, the present invention provides for fine tuning of the generated draft version of the presentation. Further, the present invention proposes an approach for the generation of templates from “best” presentations.